Mark Bartholomew

On his book Adcreep: The Case Against Modern Marketing

Cover Interview of June 06, 2017

In a nutshell

By some counts, the average American is exposed to over
three thousand advertisements each day. It is not just the number, but the
nature of these ads that are different from those in the past. They are more
personalized, more insistent, and, somewhat paradoxically, more clandestine. What
does it mean to live in a world of non-stop selling? Are consumers adequately
equipped to deal with modern marketing’s use of new technologies to surveil our
activities, study our brains, and score our social interactions? Are there
costs to this fundamental rebalancing of the relationship between advertiser
and audience? If so, why hasn’t there been more resistance on the part of lawmakers
and the general public?

Adcreep exposes the initiatives that advertisers try
to keep hidden. Each chapter in the book describes a new advertising technique
and its accompanying social dangers. Advances in neuroscience have become a
tool for subconsciously stimulating shoppers’ appetites. Corporate infiltration
of schools, state parks, and other civic territories alters the way identities
are formed so as to best suit Madison Avenue. A world of non-stop digital
surveillance leaves consumers open to blackmail and discrimination. Celebrity
advertising on social media creates a false equivalence: the famous possess
special VIP tools to manage online disclosures while ordinary citizens must
forfeit control of their posts to false friends, hostile outsiders, and
data-hungry marketers.

This is a book that should especially appeal to readers with
an interest in history. To explain why advertisers have been allowed to proceed
with these new selling techniques, it helps to have a historical backdrop in
mind.

Past controversies over invasive advertising strategies
triggered a series of legal battles, ultimately producing a regulatory
framework meant to keep business freedom and consumer protection in balance. The
book describes this regulatory framework, and uses historical examples to show
how it has dealt over time with a variety of advertising innovations. Disputes
over billboard regulation, snake oil salesmen, subliminal advertising, and the
use of digital technology to reanimate dead celebrities are all instructive
examples. They illustrate how the new advertising techniques of today echo the
forbidden techniques of the past.

The book’s ultimate conclusion is that, on a variety of
fronts, the legal system is allowing invasive advertising to proceed unchecked.
Novel interpretations of the First Amendment, contract law, intellectual
property law, and the publicity rights of celebrities all handcuff fledgling
efforts to adjust the law to account for commercial innovation.

By the end of the book, readers should be convinced of two
things. One is that modern marketing has entered a new, profoundly different
era. The other is that, in contrast to the past, lawmakers have done little to
safeguard consumers from adcreep.

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011